Can you guess which stick I used at hockey practice yesterday?
And of course, my stick just has to break on the one day that I didn’t bring a backup stick with me.
Archive for June, 2008
Breaktrough at hockey practice yesterday
Saturday, June 7th, 2008Real-time stock quotes at rock bottom prices
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008Google has just announced that Google Finance now provides free stock quotes in REAL-TIME. The “real-time” part is important, because all the major free stock quote providers (such as Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money) has always provided the quotes, but delayed. As a matter of fact, I had coincidentally recently blogged about why they delay the quotes on purpose, which to sum up quickly, is a pricing strategy to extract more money from those who are willing to pay more.
So with Google now providing the coveted real-time prices for rock-bottom prices (free!) you can’t beat, what else does this mean? I predict that MSN Money and Yahoo Finance will follow suit. That’s mostly my intuition since I have no hard facts, but I really do think they will.
If Yahoo and MSN’s finance visitors are not in the demographics where more value can be extracted from (i.e. people who actually buy and sell stocks), then MSN/Yahoo would have no incentive to drive down the price of real-time prices to $0.00 since it’s not a differentiator anyway–but on the flip side if real-time was a differentiator, then start the countdown before MSN/Yahoo tear down the silly self-induced delayed prices (uhh .. look out for your customers/visitors best interest and make them feel happy?)
In my opinion, the delay doesn’t really make people want to fork over even more loads of cash to MSN/Yahoo (so there’s little upside); it’s really more of an annoyance–”here’s your price, but ha-ha, it’s delayed”. From quick cost-benefit perspective, it appears to make sense to not delay the quotes.
For all the other folks like brokerages, if your marketing is around “sign up today and get free real-time quotes!”.. tough luck. Google just voided your campaign.
Kudos to Google for sticking to their corporate values: do not be evil (delaying information on purpose is evil), and to making useful information universally accessible to all!
This actually ties in really nicely to Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson‘s (author of The Long Tail) argument on why “free” business models make sense.
Pains that heal and those that don’t.
Sunday, June 1st, 2008In life, some problems can be solved by throwing money at the problem (e.g. growing pains in scaling up (or down) operations in your fledgling tech startup? invest in cloud computing). However, there are certainly some problems that cannot be solved even with deep pockets (e.g. Microsoft can’t for all its might and power build a Google-killer).
I’m reminded of this money-can-help vs. no-money-can-help problem in this series of Paulo Coelho’s Reflections of the Warrior of the Light. Some sufferings can heal. Some cannot. Pick wisely what you wish to suffer.
A warrior of the light never acts in a cowardly fashion.
Fight may be an excellent art of defense, but it cannot be used when fear is great. When in doubt, the warrior prefers to risk defeat and then cure his wounds – because he knows that if he runs away, he is giving his aggressor more power than he deserves.
He can cure physical suffering, but will be persecuted forever for any spiritual weakness.
Faced with difficult and painful moments, the warrior faces unfavorable circumstances with heroism, resignation and courage.
(Cognitive) memory hack: recall just before you forget
Sunday, June 1st, 2008I’m backlogged on my reading and I have just gotten around to reading this interesting (but lengthy) piece from Wired about some cool psychology hacks. I’m going to distill the key points for easier (read: less time consuming) mass consumption here. This is a very interesting memory trick. Simply put, I’m sure everyone could use a better memory.
Piotr Wozniak found a trick of how to remember stuff, and his software SuperMemo is a tool to help accomplish just that.
The problem statement and the general theory behind the solution:
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
The benefits:
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.
